Chapter V

Well, with Dickens, his own adoring public corrected him sharply and, on the whole, with true instinct. To them he was the wand-waving magician, the _improvisatore in excelsis_ who had caught up out of their midst an elderly small gentleman in spectacles and gaiters and shot him suddenly out of Goswell Street into the firmament, to be a star equal with Hercules--

sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera--

“instead of which” he had turned to making plots so patently theatrical (and of the theatre of Crummles) that the man himself was helping everybody to see through them. So came the revenge; over-proved by the opening chapter of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, which I suppose to be about the sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer. Its perusal induces on _me_ at any rate, something like physical misery, not unmixed with the sort of shame any one of us might feel if a parent behaved unbecomingly in public. I want to obey the exhortation on Mrs. Sapsea’s monument and “with a blush retire.”

But, note you, the general reader--that entity often abused, seldom quite the fool that he looks--was quick to mark and punish. Listen to Forster:

_Chuzzlewit_ had fallen short of all the expectations formed of
it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings
hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than
to any of its predecessors.... The primary cause of this, there
is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form
of publication of his last two stories.... The forty and fifty
thousand purchasers of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, the sixty and
seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprises in which
_The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ appeared had fallen
to little over twenty thousand. They rose, somewhat on Martin’s
ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he’d go
to America....

They rose at once by a couple of thousand: but a serial of course can never be easily lifted out of a rut into which it has once dropped. The reasons for this are obvious, and the serial sales of _Chuzzlewit_ never over-topped twenty-three thousand. There was a very different story when _Chuzzlewit_ came to book form. “Its sale, since,” writes Forster, “has ranked next after _Pickwick_ and _Copperfield_.” In short, Dickens had been, quite conscientiously, in the opening chapters of _Chuzzlewit_, working against the grain of his genius. His public recalled him to it in the brutal way the public uses. When he sat down to write _Chuzzlewit_ he had never an idea of carrying Martin off to America. Suddenly, in fear of falling sales and many challenges to make good his _American Notes_, he became the _improvisatore_ again and switched his hero across the Atlantic. Who will deny that the American chapters of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are its best and, save for any given chapter upon which Sarah Gamp knocks in, its most memorable?